Authentic Human Desire vs. Power

First and foremost, this is a post inspired by the OSBP situation. Having first heard about this situation via my most oft-visited news source (LiveJournal), I assumed that theferrett was, like, a friend of a friend or something, and that the situation hadn’t reached great internet fame just yet. Turns out it’s been analyzed to death already, and I don’t know how it came to be news on my LJ friends’ page (although at least one of my LJ friends has theferrett friended, and, perhaps ironically, it’s a girl who once called me a misogynist), but I’ve been thinking about it all day.

A few years ago I was struck by the phrase “authentic human desire.” I am not quite sure who I was reading at the time – it strikes me that it was related to Žižek in some way, but that may be because I’m going to relate my analysis back to Freud and Lacan. Something about the backlash against the OSBP brought all this stuff into my head and provoked a strong reaction – almost a defensiveness.

The OSBP was basically a con game where people (and by people I mean women) could opt into a system where other people (and here we’d assume that these other people would predominantly be men) could ask them, without penalty, “could I touch your breasts.”  If the woman says no, the dude has to respect that, and if she says yes, he gets to touch her breasts.  Those in favor of this project pointed out that it was a more open and honest way to interact.  Those against the project seemed likely to condemn men for wanting to touch a woman’s breasts, or at least for expressing that desire to the woman.

So let’s start with a question:  should men be condemned for wanting to touch a woman’s breasts?  The phrase “authentic human desire” presents us with a test.  What does it mean for a desire to be authentic and human?  What would it mean, on the other hand, for a desire not to be these things?  For a desire to be inauthentic is for it to be fraudulent, or manufactured; for a desire to be non-human is for it to be derived, artificial, or somehow non-essential.  One might say that some desires are inherent to human beings, while others are socially constructed, and then one might argue about which are which.  If we say that it is natural for a man to want to touch a woman’s breasts, is that to say that it is unnatural for a man not to?  Some would consider homosexuality unnatural, inauthentic, inhuman.  But that is a double-edged sword, for if we claim that homosexuality is socially constructed onto a heterosexual essence, we give social construction enough power to completely remove the influences of nature, and in doing so we lose the ability to claim that one thing or another is natural – if homosexuality could be socially constructed, then so could heterosexuality – so could anything.

What this suggests is that a test of normality or majority is insufficient to tell us whether a particular desire is an authentic human desire or is simply a desire created by society.  Does a man want to touch a woman’s breasts because he is a man, or because our culture has inundated him with images of breasts and of female subservience and objectification?  We can’t tell just by pointing out the ubiquity of breast-fetishization – after all, breasts are often the most prominent and obvious difference between men and women and so make sense for the oppressors to use as an identifier of the oppressed class.  If we accept this explanation, then the desire to touch women’s breasts is a desire that men have to touch the symbol of women’s oppression, in other words, to take possession of a woman using the tools that society presents as being for that purpose.  Not an authentic human desire, but one that is taught, from patriarch to patriarch, passed down through the generations.

On the other hand, what if we look at the desire to touch breasts as a manifestation of the desire for contact, recognition, and acceptance?  What if we accept theferrett’s exaplanation at face value, and accept that rather than trying to own or dominate these women, he really was just trying to heal a part of himself that he felt was broken during his coming of age?  Lacanian psychoanalysis describes the state of an infant as having a sense of wholeness and completeness, where all of the infant’s needs are automatically met by the mother.  According to Lacan, the lack that a person feels when he is separated from this state of ultimate completeness is the cause of all desire.  If we look at breasts the way an infant does – as a source of comfort and nourishment – then we can see a psychological root for the desire for breasts.  It is a simple manifestation of basic human need.  To touch a woman’s breasts is to connect to a state of comfort and well-being and healing.

If the desire for contact, to touch and be touch, accept and be accepted, need and be needed, is an authentic human one, then women share this desire with men.  The OSBP should work.  So what’s the problem?

Well, first of all, Lacan has often been criticized for perpetuating the sexism of Freud’s analysis.  And indeed, we’ve accounted for male desires more than adequately using Lacan, but we do not seem to have accounted for, or even located, female desires.

Second, and more important, is that we have not begun to talk about power.

Some commentators have suggested that, to put this thing in perspective, the dudes should partake in some thought experiment.  One suggestion was that men ought to be groped as well, and this seems to have been implemented to some extent.  Someone asked how men would like to have their testicles groped and fondled by complete strangers.  I daresay most of the male OSBP participants would respond “very much, thank you.”  Another person suggested that women play a version where they kick men in the testicles.  The problems that all of these thought experiments share is that none of them are actually analogous to what is going on in the OSBP.

Theferrett and his friends are right about one thing.  A situation in which man M desires to touch a woman’s breasts and woman W desires her breasts to be touched does present M and W with a certain lack of efficiency in having their desires met.  How are M and W to find each other, and how are they to communicate their desires in a socially acceptable way?  The OSBP tries to find a solution to this problem by outfitting W with a certain marker and presenting M with a certain routine that is guaranteed to be socially acceptable to those who are marked.  Now, putting aside questions outside of this system (such as its potential for abuse by those who violate the system’s rules, or the social implications of the fetishization of breasts), what is wrong with this system itself?

Keep your answers in mind, because really, the OSBP is just an unambiguous version of the system we have now.  Now, women are outfitted with certain markers that declare whether or not they are to be approached and in what ways, and men approach them in ways that are influenced by these markers, and women either consent or not, and men are supposed to accept a refusal graciously, but they might not.  The problem with the system we have now is that it contains ambiguities – a man might incorrectly read a certain outfit as a marker of a certain attitude, for instance, a low-cut skirt as an invitation to a cat-call or a come-on, for instance.  A green button, however, is unambiguous, and nobody is going to mistake a red button for a green one (except someone who is red-green colorblind, that is.)  Also, in the non-OSBP system, a man might not ask before touching, because of context and signals and body language – he might be wrong, or he might be right, and it can be hard to tell.  In the OSBP, the man asks before touching, because it is an explicit rule, or he violates an explicit rule unambiguously.

So far, this system sounds better.  Fewer ambiguities mean that malicious men can be caught, identified, and ostracized more easily, based on criteria that everyone agreed to beforehand.  There’s less potential for a man to accidentally push a woman farther than she is willing to go, or to intimidate a woman by making unwanted advances.  Men can feel free to express their desires and women can feel safe to be desired, all without social awkwardness.

Enter the workings of power.  The idea that making the expression of desire more efficient is good is based on the idea that the expression of desire is itself good, and that more of it would make things better.  It certainly seems better for M and W, who want to touch and be touched.  But we can’t look at expected value without taking the bad with the good.

First, let’s look at the men’s side.  The man wants to touch some breasts.  In a normal social setting, he fears both rejection and punishment if he asks to touch a woman’s breasts.  Even if she accepts, people might still hear about how he propositioned some random woman, and he may still endure social punishment.  A man also does not have a reliable way to find the women who would say yes.  So, a low chance of success coupled with fear of rejection and fear of punishment cause these men to refrain from asking the boob question.  In the OSBP, the man has a reliable way to avoid punishment and a better chance of finding women who will say yes to him.  Greater chance of reward, no chance of punishment, lower chance of rejection.  OSBP is a win for the man.

Now, let’s look at the woman’s side.  In a normal social setting, a woman fears that men will make unwanted sexual advances.  A woman also fears that if she rejects the man, he will sexually assault her.  The kind of man willing to break social convention enough to ask her if he can touch her breasts may also break social convention enough to do it anyway if she says no.  A woman has to be careful of what she wears lest some man interpret her outfit as a license to assault her.  A woman has some reason to fear whenever a man desires her.  In the OSBP, does the woman stop fearing unwanted advances?  Does she stop fearing sexual assault?  Does she stop fearing misinterpretation?  Does she stop fearing that the rules will be broken?  Maybe she can feel safer letting someone touch her breasts knowing that they are are following social convention, and maybe she has less reason to fear misinterpretation, and so maybe she can feel somewhat better off than in the non-OSBP.

However, overall, the stakes for a woman are much higher per desire-transaction.  It is not clear that reducing somewhat the risks that a woman takes in any single desire-transaction reduces overall risk if the number of desire-transactions increases drastically.  I want to make clear that a woman experiences taking these risks even if there are no rule-breakers.  The question is not how men behave, but how power behaves.  The thing about the OSBP that is objectionable boils down to this:  it is a system in which imbalanced power transactions are encouraged to take place.  These transactions may well be balanced somewhat better than normal social interactions between men and women, but they are still imbalanced.

I would describe OSBP as generally sex-positive and societal norms as generally sex-negative.  The problem with any sex-positive project is that it threatens to simply repeat the oppressive patriarchal norms built into society, which OSBP does pretty clearly.  However, without sex-positive projects, there is nothing to challenge patriarchal sexual norms.  That doesn’t give a hall pass to all sex-positive projects; we have to rate them on their merits.  One that’s just about dudes groping boobs isn’t likely to challenge much; on the other hand, if the participants (specifically the female ones) can say that they were able to safely express and fulfill their desires, can we afford to ignore a system that really was able decrease a woman’s risk-per-transaction?

Of course what really killed the OSBP were the externalities.  The things outside of the system.  The fact that the focus on breasts plays into issues of the male gaze and objectification and self-surveillance and the breaking down of women into their component parts, and the fact that there are people who would be encouraged by the system to go outside the system, both make the considerations of the relative merits of OSBP itself nearly irrelevant.

The question I want to leave with is this:  Given the authentic human desires – for connectedness, wholeness, contact, recognition, acceptance – and given the imbalance of power between men and women, is there a system that can actually allow these desires to be expressed and fulfilled in a safe, fair, and balanced way?  Or do we have to keep muddling along, occasionally blundering into our own OSBPs-in-miniature, repressed and disconnected and alienated from the rest of humanity?